


The Vet Bill

by fadeverb



Series: Leo [13]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-02
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-22 05:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/909338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's important to get your Djinn regularly examined by the vet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Vet Bill

Jacinth is waiting for me when I pull into the clinic parking lot, which is a good sign, and she doesn't look like she means to shoot me, which is a better one. The last time we had business dealings it ended well, but lately I've run into so many people who want to kill me that I find it's easier to start from that assumption instead of getting my hopes up.

She looks down on me when I get out of the car, but in the way that comes from a difference in heights. "Fucking hell, Leo," she says, "you weren't kidding about a new vessel." Jacinth looks like a Nordic goddess, complete with the flowing blonde hair that must be a pain to control in surgery, while my current vessel is what could best be described as petite. Or cute. I try to avoid the cute, but there's no way around it.

I hit the lever for the trunk release. "What, the voice on the phone didn't give you a hint? Help me get him out. Getting him in by myself was bad enough."

"No leverage. I can imagine." Jacinth pulls on a pair of surgical gloves, and does most of the hauling while we work Zhune out of the trunk. He's still breathing, so there's that much going right. Never heard of a demon bleeding to death--we're okay if the initial damage can't take us down--but there's always a first time, especially when artifacts come into play. "So how come he's the bloody one, and you're not hurt?"

"They didn't see me. They saw him."

"Are they behind you?" Jacinth pauses to stare out at the dark street while Zhune dangles between the two of us. "Because it'll get a lot more expensive if you're bringing trouble to me, and by more expensive, I mean more than you can pay."

"No, I took care of them." The story's more complicated than that, involving the Song of Ethereal Form and the removal of several supporting beams, but I'm not about to go into the details. Suffice to say they're not following me any time soon. "Are we getting him inside, or are we standing out here holding a body all night?"

"Charming as ever," says Jacinth, and rolls her eyes, but she kicks the door open behind her so we can get my partner inside.

The clinic's quiet this time of night. Not a human to be seen, and the rows of cages in the back only hold a doped-up pit bull and a pair of sleepy cats that stare at us balefully. Jacinth dumps Zhune on the exam table with his feet dangling over the edge. "What sort of damage are we talking?"

"I'm not sure. Only a few shots from a pistol, but he dropped fast." I'm happy to let Zhune get shot instead of me--his vessel can take it--but it's no good feeling when he keels over so fast. That means I'd go down harder if they got a chance to come for me, and this is why I was willing to break out with some disturbance from collapsing floors to get away fast.

"Huh." Jacinth strips off her bloody gloves, and pulls on a fresh pair, then ties her hair back in quick practiced movements. "Sit over there, and shut up while I find out."

I sit down like she said, and study the chart on the wall. In three minutes I know more than I ever wanted to about ear mites, and I'm itching to get moving. "So what is it?"

Jacinth works a metal lump out of Zhune's shoulder with a pair of forceps, and displays it to me. "That's your problem. Holy Pistol, Holy Bullets. And high-quality ones, judging by the mess they've made of your buddy's chest. Are you fucking with War now?"

"No," I say, in all honesty. It was the Sword shooting at us. I think. They don't offer introductions before the firefight breaks out. One of them moved more like a Soldier than an angel, but it's hard to tell the difference between a human and a celestial during firefights. Either one can get a bullet into you, and I wasn't sticking around to count the bodies after I took the house down and dug Zhune out. "So how much is it going to cost me? I can't afford to drive around with a body in the trunk until he wakes up."

Jacinth tilts her glasses down--she only wears them to look more like a proper vet--and stares me in the eye over them. "Month Geas, if you want him back to full health."

"You're kidding me."

"Songs don't come cheap, Leo. Especially multiples in a row." She plucks out another bullet. "Especially for someone with a vessel like this. These are a lot of holy bullets for him to take front and center and still be breathing. Who is he? Not that twitchy little psycho who used to tag behind you."

"Djinn," I say. "He's my partner. How much can you do without Essence? I was under the impression you were a doctor of some sort. Unless you can't handle this kind of body."

"Dog, Djinn..." The Lilim shrugs, and drops a third bullet into a plastic bin. "They're close enough on the inside. I like dogs better. So how'd you end up leashed? Never struck me as the sort who'd want a Lurker lurking."

"That's not any of your business." I smile sharp and precise at her. "Not unless you want to negotiate terms."

Jacinth pulls out a fourth bullet. How many times did he get hit, anyway? I'd thought it was three, maybe four max, but she's going right back in to fish around. "Let's see. Do you want him healed until his coat is glossy, or will you settle for conscious and mobile?"

"Assuming the price quoted was for the former, I can live with the latter for a price break."

"That would come cheaper." She pulls out a fifth bullet, this one so mangled it's more of a twist than a lump. "But still not cheap. Tell you what, Leo. I have a project that I don't want traced back to me, so if you can take care of that, and tell me how you got chained up to a Djinn, I'll get him back on his feet. Sound fair to you?"

"Depends on the project."

"But of course." She pulls off the second set of gloves, and then shimmies her way down to a seat next to me. I wonder how many of her Geases come from special deals at the clinic, and how many come from her patients who can't keep their eyes off her chest. "It's simple. There's an odious little man in town who I want discredited with certain parties. All you have to do is scatter poisoned bait around the dog park down the street, plant the rest in his basement, and I can take care of the rest. This is not a town where a man can poison half a dozen dogs without repercussions. If you can plant receipts for buying the poison from a nearby town, all the better, but only if you pay in cash. Credit card traces complicate matters."

"So I'm guessing you didn't start this clinic out of your love for our furry friends." I stretch my legs out, and watch Zhune on the table. There are advantages to having him quiet and not bugging me, but not ones that outweigh the benefits of a partner watching my back. "I don't like messing with Animals."

Jacinth smirks. "Beat up by an angry Servitor of Animals once?"

"Yes. If this is going to piss off the wrong people--"

"You're Theft, Leo. You'll be gone before the first puppy gets rushed into my lobby frothing and shaking. No one will trace it to you."

I figure she's about as confident on this point as I am on Sword goons not tracing me to her place, so it's fair. "Fine. I want him coherent and mobile. I'll take care of your project once he's able to assist me with it."

"That and the story of how you got leashed," Jacinth says. "Promise?"

"Couldn't I spot you a few Essence instead?"

"No." The Lilim taps me on the nose. I hate wearing a cute little vessel. "I want to know. Take it or leave it."

I sigh. "Cross my heart and hope to take dissonance, yeah, whatever. Get him fixed?"

"Promise," she says, with a dazzling smile. I can feel the Geas settle around me. She stands up, rubbing her hands together. "Let's get this puppy barking. Want to start the story before he's up and likely to provide color commentary?"

She has an excellent point. I kick my feet up onto the other chair. "Remember how, back when we got introduced for business deals, your Sister told you I was a Servitor of Theft looking for some odd jobs?"

Jacinth nods, humming the beginning of the Song of Healing. I ought to learn it myself, but it took me long enough to get Thunder down that I'm not in the mood to start studying another Song.

"She was..." I wait for Jacinth to look at me, and grin. "Misinformed." She blinks, not pausing in the humming, and I might as well take this story for what it's worth if I have to tell it. "I was Renegade. But if you say you're working for Theft, who's going to contradict you? Good reason to be running from the Game, and to keep moving. No one needs an explanation for why you're swiping resources and looking for jobs."

A thrum of Essence, and the wounds on Zhune's chest knit together, pink and bloody beneath the shreds of his shirt. "You are fucking kidding me," Jacinth says. She looks impressed. Sort of a nice change of pace from Zhune slapping me upside the head and lecturing me on infernal politics that I never cared about. "You got away with it?"

"For a while." I can play it up as a game, with a smirk of my own, like I wasn't running terrified all that time and staying free by luck as often as by wit or skill. "I knew it couldn't last, so I skipped out to the Marches. The Game doesn't have the presence there that it does on the corporeal, and Nightmares doesn't go looking for you outside of their territory."

"But it didn't last."

"Didn't last. I got pulled back to Earth for some personal business with debts I owed," and a Lilim understands that, even if she wouldn't understand the debts in question, "and--look, are you going to heal him or what?"

"I'm working on it. Don't give me shit about this, Leo. You know your larceny, I know my healing. Give me a breather. Your pet's got a lot of body mass to stitch together." She turns back to Zhune, humming another round of the Song.

"Anyway, I find I'm back on the corporeal for the indefinite future, due to debts that _aren't_ part of the story, and figure I can go back to the same routine, because it worked before." Let's not discuss the part where I was about to work for one of the more morally flexible Words in Heaven. Everyone needs to make ends meet. "Except before I can get that far, a great and glorious Prince of Hell shows up to have a chat with me about using his name when I'm doing my own thing. The Game's not the only part of Hell that objects to freelancers."

Another hit of Essence, and Zhune coughs on the table. His eyes aren't open yet, but it's a good sign. "Not all freelancers," says Jacinth.

"The ones that aren't Lilim."

"Poor Destroyer." She laughs at me, not too unkindly. "You weren't made Free, so there's no way you can become Free. Sucks to be you."

"Tell me about it." I wonder if I'd be willing to trade my resonance for a Lilim's, if it meant being Free. No point in pondering impossibilities. "Anyway, this great and glorious Prince says that I can work for him in fact as well as claim, or I can say goodbye to my Force cohesion. It's not a hard decision. It's not a decision at all, if it comes down to living or not living. Any choice that involves certain personal destruction isn't a real choice."

"I don't know," says Jacinth, suddenly serious again. "It's a choice of sorts. There's freedom in being able to choose your own end over...other options."

"I can't think of anything that would make that a real choice."

She smiles again, a little too fast. Whatever it is that she's thinking of, she doesn't want to tell me about it, which is fair. I'm glossing over parts of this story. "And that's your choice. So keep going."

"Right. We were at the part where I'm not a suicidal idiot." I'm catching the rhythm of this Song by the third time around, though not well enough to repeat it. Maybe I'll ask Zhune to teach me how to use it myself. "So I go from being a Renegade with the Game on my heels to a Servitor of Theft with the Game on my heels, a brand new dissonance condition, and a Prince who'd rather not see me go Renegade from his Word too. Which I can't blame him for being concerned about, given my track record at that point."

The third time's the charm, and Zhune coughs harder, opens his eyes at this rendition of the Song. He sits up on the table, blinking, and doesn't stop looking dangerous until he sees I'm there. Then he slides right back into a dashing smile for Jacinth and the casual assurance of a man who knows what he's doing. We're all excellent liars in this room.

"Anyway," I say, "that was why my great and glorious Prince decided to stick me with this idiot who doesn't know better than to step in front of five successive bullets coming from an artifact gun. I don't get to run away, but I get a meat shield, so it's nearly even."

"How do you feel?" asks Jacinth, running slender fingers down his chest in what I wouldn't call a clinical manner.

"Like I got shot in the chest five times," says Zhune. He swings his legs off the table, and tests how well he can hold his own weight before stepping away from that support. "I didn't realize the gun was an artifact. Even James Bond gets shot once in a while."

"Excuses, excuses." I point a finger at him. "Next time, I'm leaving you there. Your vessel is too heavy for me to haul it around more than once. Maybe if you go through Trauma you'll come out on the other side with a lighter vessel."

"Then I wouldn't provide so much cover for you to hide behind, would I?" His smile says that we'll argue this one out later in privacy. Fair enough. He doesn't know Jacinth, and let's not have personal arguments in front of strangers. "What's the doctor's bill coming to?"

"We have to poison dogs for the vet," I say, standing up myself. "Business isn't good enough."

"How disappointing," says Zhune. "There's no style to that."

"So you can hand-feed the Dobermans yourself." I head for the door before he can get any ideas about hitting on the Lilim. It would be like him to risk Geases that way. "Thanks for the help, and we'll get out of here now. Text me the address."

"If anyone shows up looking for you," says Jacinth, "you'll owe me."

"Only if they cause you problems." I meet her gaze on this one. "I'll pay up for trouble I drag in, but I'm not taking debt for potential trouble."

"Deal." She draws an X across her chest with one finger, and gives Zhune a look that makes me ready to drag him out by the collar if he won't follow. "Come back next time you're shot, and I'll give you a good deal."

"How sweet," Zhune says, and then grins at me as he follows me out so that I know he's not buying it. "We're actually poisoning dogs?"

I lead the way back out to the parking lot. "Yes, we're poisoning dogs."

"No style at all."

"You want to make deals with Lilim when I'm unconscious, you can negotiate for daring raids on Tethers. When you're unconscious, I get to make the deals. Safe, straightforward, style-free. I could have left you buried and bleeding, you know."

"You could have," says Zhune, and takes the shotgun seat in the car. "But you didn't."

I shrug, and turn on the car without looking at him. "Like you said. I need someone to stand in the way of the bullets."


End file.
